Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own this. Pretty much everything I own can be packed into a large travel case, and I'd like to see you try and fit the entire Harry Potter universe in there!

- III -

Harry checked the clock on the wall again.

3:37am

He sighed, and then winced as his hand rubbed up against the suddenly rough feeling linens of his bed. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were large, dark bags sitting heavily under them. He pulled out his arm and glared at it in the dim light.

Three days. Harry thought, viciously. Three days and you haven't stopped this infernal itching for longer than a minute.

It wasn't helped, Harry reflected, that he had not had a single practical lesson to take his frustrations out on so far. Even his viscous over pruning of the Flutterbush in Herbology hadn't left him feeling much better. He scratched his lightning bolt scar, absently feeling his fingers tingle unpleasantly.

As much as he wanted to be able to let out his sleep deprived anger, Harry wasn't looking forward to his lessons today with much joy. He didn't want to have to reveal his new scars if he could get away with it, and every time he had tried to cast a spell while keeping them hidden the spell had failed.

The scars

Harry was suddenly worried. What if the constant itching was a sign that something was wrong with them? He hated looking at them, and had been all too happy to simply hide them now that he knew he could. He hadn't even considered that it might be bad for them, or him.

He focused, and slowly the scars rippled up from beneath his skin. He clenched his fist, feeling them pull on each other, then looked again. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with them, but he was hardly a certified mediwizard. The itching did stop, however. The scars seemed to almost glow silver in the darkness.

Satisfied for now Harry willed the scars away, but immediately they started itching again. Harry glared at his arm again, before grumbling to himself. He could always hide them again tomorrow.

Letting the scars out once more Harry finally fell into an exhausted sleep.

Far too early, the sunlight that streamed through the windows hit Harry in the face. He groaned silently and rolled over, prepared to go back to sleep. After a second, Harry's eyes slowly blinked open, and he rolled again. Then he coughed, experimentally. Silence. He sat up jerkily and grabbed his alarm clock.

10:05

His brow furrowed for a second before he grabbed his new class schedule. He was late for charms. He threw on a set of robes and was sprinting out of the Fat Lady's Portrait in record time, his shouted apologies to the upper year student he had nearly run into still coming out silent. It didn't occur to Harry until he was two floors down that he should probably visit the hospital wing first.

- III -

Professor Flitwick looked up as Harry pushed the door open.

"You're late, Harry. By quite a margin in fact." He didn't sound particularly angry, more a little confused and worried. Professor Flitwick never sounded angry, although that could have just been his high pitched voice.

"Sorry Professor. I was hit by a Silencing Charm this morning by... someone. I didn't trust myself to counter it correctly."

"Ah yes, wordless casting is quite the challenge, especially with your latest development," He squeaked out, "Well, we're continuing our work on the Summoning Charm this lesson. You weren't here for our first lesson, so if you'll come over here we'll work on getting you up to speed."

He beckoned Harry to the back corner of the classroom, where there was a small stack of cushions lying on a table.

"Now, first things first. May I examine your hand please?"

Harry rolled back the sleeve of his robe and presented his arm to the diminutive teacher, with the scars still hidden. Professor Flitwick pulled out his wand and waved it in a complex, tight pattern, causing a blue glow to roll up Harry's arm. Harry grimaced as a fresh wave of itching, verging on the painful erupted wherever the light touched. The professor noticed his discomfort and immediately cancelled the spell.

"Harry? Is everything all right?"

Harry flexed his fingers a few times as the itching abated before answering. "It's nothing professor. It just itches a lot."

Flitwick nodded thoughtfully and charmed a nearby quill with a wave of his wand. The quill floated over to a stack of parchment and started scribbling

"Fascinating. Would you mind if I were to try some other detection spells Harry?" the diminutive professor squeaked.

Harry shrugged, holding his hand out again. After several more flashes of light ranging from blue to a neon orange, each of which resulted in an especially unpleasant itching, Professor Flitwick stopped and 'hmm'd to himself, looking slightly confused

"Very well then. Now, the headmaster mentioned something about a Lumos charm?"

Harry nodded and, remembering the previous attempt, willed his scars to the surface. He raised his hand, but the charms teacher stopped him.

"What are these Harry?"

Harry looked down, slightly ashamed of his latest disfigurement, willing them away again. "They're all that are left of my wand, professor. I can make them disappear, but if I want to cast with them I need them to be visible."

"Fascinating! I may need to bring Minn- I mean, professor McGonnagal in on this, Harry. That was no invisibility charm you cast on that arm of yours. Now, may I examine your arm with the scars out? I will just use a single spell to save you some discomfort. You said that the pastel green was the least painful?"

At Harry's nod, and the reappearance of the scars, Flitwick recast the identification charm at Harry's arm. To Harry's surprise, his arm did not start to itch. His surprise must have shown, because his charms teacher pulled the spell and asked him what was wrong.

"Nothing, that time. Nothing at all, not even a little itch." Harry was decidedly confused. Flitwick seems to share this state, but he put his wand away and smiled up at Harry.

"Well, I think that is a puzzle for another time. For now, a Lumos?"

"Yes professor. Lumos!". A haze of itching washed down Harry's scars, culminating in his palm and forming the same squishy ball as when Dumbledore had asked him to cast the spell. It provided a fair bit of light from between his fingers, which Harry thought was somewhat odd. He couldn't remember that happening last time, it had only started to glow after striking the headmaster.

"And now, I believe you throw it? To me please Harry."

Harry used the same pushing motion he had used with Dumbledore, but this time his spell seemed, somehow, to be affected by gravity. It dropped gently from his hand and splashed against the floor. They both looked at the apparent puddle of brightly glowing liquid between them. Professor Flitwick prodded at it with an animated broom handle, which came away coated in the same golden glow.

"How very... odd. This is unlike any spell I have ever seem before, nor have I ever heard of a spell being affected by gravity in this way. Perhaps you could dispel it for now?"

Harry nodded, despite how it had failed last time, and pointed at the glowing liquid on the floor.

"Nox!" Another wave of itches pulsed down from Harry's elbow and raced to his fingertips, where a number of fat, black sparks leapt forward. They seemed to suck the glowing liquid into themselves, vanishing or growing lighter as the liquid was pulled towards them. Eventually, all that was left was a single black spark. It hurt to look at, seeming to drink in the light around it. Professor Flitwick gently prodded it with the glowing mop handle, and both glow and spark vanished. Harry's mouth was slightly agape. Hermione, who had been secretly observing the two out of the corner of her eye was blind sided by a summoned cushion she had forgotten about at Harry's strange display of magic.

The tiny teacher nodded to himself and conjured two small glass pitchers, which he set on a table.

"Very nice. Now, again, but put the liquid into this pitcher, and the sparks into that one."

Harry nodded, looking at his fingers, and turned to the two pitchers.

"Lumos!"

This time, Harry was expecting the itches. He was not expecting them to race down his arm at nearly twice the speed, and then back up again. The candles, placed all around the room for evening classes, burst into light, startling more than one student into being accosted by flying cushions. Their flames burned white hot, and perfectly spherical. In a matter of seconds, the flames had eaten their way though the candles and winked out.

Professor Flitwick frowned to himself, and the charmed quill sped up, scattering ink droplets over the parchment behind him. He mentally reviewed what Albus had told him of Harry's unusual manifestation of the Lumos charm, and what he had seen so far. His face slowly broke into a grin.

"Once more Harry. With feeling! Isn't this exciting?"

Harry looked at his teacher, looked at a few of the students who were glaring at him, and nodded. Taking one last look around the room, and hoping that this time he would blind a few of the sheep that glared at his back, he raised his arm.

"Lumos!"

This time, there was no itches. There was a burning sensation, clawing up his arm. It was mercifully brief, but he clenched his eyes from the pain. There were several loud thumps, and several people screamed. There was the sound of Professor Flitwick calling for silence.

Harry opened his eyes. Everything looked a little grey, a little washed out. Professor Flitwick was stood in front of him, reaching out oddly with his hands, his eyes wide.

"Harry? Harry are you OK?"

"I'm fine professor. What happened?"

"Someone must have been distracted, watching you and not what they were aiming their Accio at. The castle's storm blinds have shut. Now can someone... someone other than Harry, please cast a Lumos? I seem to have lost my wand."

"What are you talking about professor? It's right here." Harry asked, confused. Everyone was reaching, groping for wands that were on tables mere inches from their fingers as though they couldn't see them.

There was a muttered "Lumos," and Hermione's wandtip lit up. She directed it around the classroom until several other students grabbed their wands and added their own lumos to the room. Harry was now distinctly worried.

With the help of Lavender's lighted wand, Flitwick took his from Harry's proffering hand, and twitched it upwards with a brief incantation of "Sol lie!". A ball of harsh blue light appeared hovering just below the ceiling and Harry hissed from the too bright light.

What was going on? What was everyone acting so strangely?

Several quite calls of "Nox" could be heard around the classroom, but Harry kept his eyes shut. The miniature sun that the charms professor had conjured was still there, bright enough to shine through his eyelids.

There were a few more muffled thumps, and the intensity of the light ratcheted up a notch. After a few seconds, Harry heard the voice of Professor Flitwick.

"Harry? Are you all right there?"

Harry forced his eyes open and looked down at his teacher. Immediately, they started to water and he was forced to squint. The light was nearly blinding. He heard Flitwick gasp, and then mutter something. The light dimmed, although it still seemed unnecessarily bright. He opened his eyes again to see Professor Flitwick stood on a pile of books and peering at his face intently. The charms professor had created what looked like a grey curtain around the two of them, cutting him off from the lights outside. After a few seconds, Harry opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but Flitwick forestalled him.

"Hermione, would you be able to run along to Professor McGonnagal's office and inform her that I need her here? She should be free right now."

The professor turned back to Harry and waved his wand, pulling a mirror from nowhere. Harry took it, confused and worried. He looked down at his reflection and gasped.

His pupils had changed. They were now slit vertically, and his irises had expanded to fill the entire of his visible eye. He looked like an unfortunate transfiguration accident, and suddenly understood why Professor McGonnagal had been sent for. He reminded himself of Hermione after the unfortunate polyjuice accident, just without all the extra hair.

"I think, Harry, that we are done practising Lumos for today."

Harry just nodded in shock and turned his gaze accusingly to his scared arm. He whimpered to himself as he looked at it. The scars had grown, and now covered a good inch more flesh than they had when he had entered the class. They now mapped out every vein in his arm until his elbow, and seemed to be creating a ring there. He didn't know why, or how, but had a feeling that it was Not Good.

- III -

Dumbledore steepled his fingers and sighed, listening to Minerva's report. By the time she had got to the charms classroom, Harry had managed to rectify whatever had caused Hermione to burst into her room nearly hysterical. Apparently, Harry's plight had called up bad memories for the girl. Dumbledore didn't really see what he could do about it, and he told his second in command so.

"Nothing you can do? Albus, the boy transfigured his eyes. His eyes Albus! With a lighting charm! That isn't normal, nor is it safe. Fillius was telling me that every spell he tried had a seemingly random effect, only loosely related to what he wanted to achieve at best! It's bad enough when he is casting the most basic of charms, but complex transfiguration, or hexes? No Albus. It would be dangerous for him, and for the other students. You need to do something. Teach him personally, why don't you?"

Dumbledore peered at her over his glasses. "The oaths on the goblet are binding, Minerva. I can teach him a little, only because I was planning on giving him private lessons at some point in the future anyway, but those lessons were not to be till his seventh year. As such, there is little I can do beyond providing a safe location to practice and an occasional nudge to certain library shelves. And Fillius can provide extra help because he will help any student with duelling who asks, and has been doing so for years. But taking over Harry's schooling is not something either of us is able to do. Me, because of oaths, and Fillius because of his own duties. Harry will simply have to work on his... unique condition, and we will have to be ready to correct any unusual effects that may manifest. Now I believe that he is in your class later today. You may give him a desk slightly away from the other students if you are worried Minerva, but right now I suspect that what the lad craves more than anything else is normalcy."

- III -

Harry stepped into the transfiguration classroom feeling rather nervous. According to Hermione, the past two weeks had been taken up with Switching Spells, and it didn't look like they would be doing anything different this class looking at the diagram on the board. Switching Spells sounded like the kind of thing that could go horribly wrong given her explanation. Seeing as when Harry had practised the Lumos in the common room the previous evening his arm had ignited with bluebell flames, he was not looking forward to what could possibly happen in this class.

Professor McGonagall swept in with her characteristic stern features well in place, and began her lecture. Harry tried to keep up, but having missed the first two weeks quickly began to struggle. By the end of the twenty-minute talk, he had gathered that yes, switching spells were very dangerous if performed incorrectly, so like good students they would be practicing on animals before they moved anywhere close to humans. He also noticed that when the random assortment of items for today's class was handed out, the professor handed him only a single matchstick.

Once everyone else in the class was busy getting frustrated at plants and kitchen equipment, the Professor walked back to Harry.

"Mr. Potter, I have something I will need to talk to you about after the class. In preparation for this talk, I would like to go back to basics with you. The very basics. You remember how to turn a matchstick into a needle, do you not?"

Harry couldn't believe his ears. That was the first spell he had ever been taught in this class. She was treating him like an idiot, someone who couldn't do the most basic of spells!

Professor McGonnogal's face didn't change as she watched his reaction, but her eyes darted over him. Despite her age, she was well practiced in noticing details, as one must be when one's chief job is turning things into other things. She noticed how his hair shifted slightly as though in a light breeze, and how the nails on his hand had sharpened, ever so slightly. Almost like they were trying to become claws. "Mr Potter, I don't mean for this to be patronising. In fact, I believe I may have a way to help you with your latest problems. But for other people who have had similar 'accidents' in the past, starting from scratch helped them, and the earlier they did it, the better the results. Please, matchstick into needle."

Harry breathed out the anger and muttered the incantation. The itching spread down his arm and focused on the tip of his finger. He jabbed at the matchstick, and there was a needle on the table, but Professor McGonagall was shaking her head at him.

"Transfigure the matchstick Harry. You just vanished it and then… well, conjured a new needle from nothing. Think, focus. Wood turning into metal. The process is just as important as the goal."

Harry tried again, with a fresh matchstick. This time, it ignited, revealing a needle inside. The next one collapsed into dozens of tiny needles. By the time the class was over, he still had not turned a matchstick into a satisfactory result.

As the students filed out, Professor McGonagall sat behind her desk and motioned Harry to come up. She passed him a small box. "There are more matches in there. Practice until you get it perfect please. This may be worse than I thought. Now, the headmaster explained his theory as to what happened to you? I am now going to explain mine. Please, don't say anything, as anything I don't know I can't tell. But if you had happened to be attempting to emulate your father and his friends, I would have hoped you would have looked up how to do it properly. Doing such things badly can lead you to irreparably damaging your core. IF such a thing has happened, then practicing early level spells can help stabilise it once again. IF you choose not to practice… well there are a number of witches and wizards out there who can only cast a single spell, that of their transformation. Indeed, some say that Kneezles first came about from such a man. On other, unrelated topics, if I see an unusual, lost looking cat around the castle, I shall avoid notifying Filch, and I will let you know that we keep a register of student pets. You may want to have a friend register you, and that not being registered Is a ministry offence. Do I make myself clear?"

Harry nodded, somewhat bemused. What was she getting at?

"Good. Then good day Mr. Potter. And I would like to remind you that the benefits do outstrip the risks, when done right."

Harry got up to leave, before turning back at the door, just in time to see a tabby cat with unusual markings around its eyes slink though a back door.

- III -

The next week or two proceeded as normally as they could for Harry. He hid his scars whenever he could, letting them out only for spell work, and sleeping. He found they itched and tingled seemingly randomly around the castle when hidden. Some of the seventh years put their animosity of him on hold to try and get him to teach them wandless casting, but quickly returned to glares and rumour mongering when he explained that he couldn't help them.

He kept trying with turning a matchstick into a needle, along with doing whatever Flitwick asked of him. He'd gone through over a hundred of them, by Hemiones count. Originally, she'd been documenting the effects that his spells had, trying to find a pattern. She gave up around the fifty mark, after one matchstick turned into a caterpillar. After another week, when the chrysalis opened, revealing a very sharp butterfly, Harry gave up too. Flitwick's lessons however, did eventually bear fruit.

Harry found that eventually, he could force the magic into a familiar shape. Not quite perfect, and never quite the same, but he could reliably produce Lumos liquid on command, or create short lived hovering balls. The diminutive professor took this as a proof of concept, and started Harry on Accio.

This, Harry and the rest of the class agreed, seemed like a terrible idea, but Flitwick would have none of it. And so he practiced.

Harry called up gusts of wind, gave the cushion froggy legs, summoned a small green creature who's existence could be summed up with "I pass cushions", pulled the cushion towards him in straight lines, in bits that reassembled, and in bits that didn't.

He once created an effect that looked similar to teleportation, but on closer inspection turned out to have actually created an exact duplicate and thoroughly destroyed the original. The green cushion passer escaped into the corridor and couldn't be hunted down, and was last heard having a loud existential crisis in the Slytherin common room. Finally, Harry got an effect that was, mostly, similar to the standard summoning charm. The scars had grown up to nearly his shoulder, yet at the same time they had grown suppler. He could move his hand freely, without discomfort.

He could say one thing about his magic. It got concepts very quickly. It was narrowing down the possible applications of that concept to something repeatable and relatively safe that took most of his time. Unfortunately, his time was running out.

With the first task rapidly approaching, Harry realised something rather important. He didn't have time to care about what other people thought of him. It took him two or three times longer to perfect a charm than the rest of his classmates, and the classes weren't slowing down. He started begging off Astronomy with his status as champion, because he needed the sleep, and then begging off sleep because he needed to practice.

The Marauder's Map, and his invisibility cloak, were invaluable.

- III -

Wow this one took a while. Like, well over a year.

In my defence, I moved to China, then back again. I went to university. I finished first year. But yeah. My bad.

I do want to keep writing this, and probably will, eventually. I also want to finish off my other projects. I might try a few one shots to get back into the swing of regular writing.

I'm also probably going to accelerate this. Pretty soon things should start to click into place for Harry, and when that happens I probably won't write out every failed spell he tries or the day to day life. Hopefully I'll cover the important bits